I went in earlier than he expected one evening in answer to his never-failing appeal: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" and found him sitting up in his berth with a scrap of pencil and a crumpled pocket notebook and his eyes glued on something that he saw through his open porthole.

He had the top inner berth, on the corridor side of the cabin, and by looking across the corridor he could get a complete view of nearly the whole of the dining-room of the liner. He thrust his pencil and paper out of sight under his blankets as I drew near; but he had done this too late, and he knew it as he met my look with one of his delightful smiles.

"Whatever are you doing, Little Yeogh Wough? Show me that notebook."

He drew forth the crumpled little pad of paper, and I found scribbled on it the following entries:

"Mr. B——, four whiskies and sodas, with the whisky more than half-way up the glass each time.

"Mrs. Delaplaine Waterton—three glasses of sherry and bitters.

"Mr. Pinkerby—a KÜmmel and three whiskies.

"Lord ——, five whiskies and sodas, making eight since two o'clock this afternoon."

"Oh, Roland! How naughty of you! Whatever put it into your head to spy on people like this?"

The laugh that was on his lips was now dancing in his big brown eyes.

"It doesn't do them any harm, and it's very funny," he said. "I can hear a good deal of what they say. I don't want to listen, you know, but I can't help hearing. Still, it doesn't matter, because I would not tell anybody for anything in the world.... Just fancy, Big Yeogh Wough, we're going to be in Kiel to-morrow! I shall see father in a tobacconist's shop again."

"Is there anything so very wonderful in that?"

"Of course there is. He's a different man directly he gets into a tobacconist's. You really wouldn't know he was father. It's so funny to watch him."

"Oh! Men are always like that, dear. You'll be like it yourself when you're a grown man. No matter how much a man loves a woman he gets free from her somehow inside a tobacco shop. But I hope you want to see Kiel for better reasons than that."

He nodded as he patted my hand.

"I know. It's the Kaiser's jewel of a port, where he hugs up the beginnings of his navy."

"Yes—his navy which he thinks will one day beat ours. I hope we shall be able to see one or two of his ships—yet I don't expect we shall. He believes in the old saying that children and fools—especially British fools—shouldn't see half-done work."

"If you don't mind, Big Yeogh Wough, I'm not going to wear my glasses when we go ashore there to-morrow. I don't really need them to see with, you know, and I don't want to look as if I'd got anything wrong with me when I'm going through a German town."

"All right, you dear boy. And we'll try to get a look at Wilhelm's ships. But what does it matter what they are like? We'll drum them up the North Sea as we drummed others before them. We've nothing to fear from outsiders as long as we don't let any dry rot get into us at home."

"Kitchener and others like him will see to that."

"Kitchener can't see to everything. It would take scores of great men to make a breakwater against a whole flood of dull stupidity. We've all got to help. You'll have to help a lot. You'll have to learn to be very strong—but without being hard. If you are hard you're like a hyacinth in a March gale as compared with a daffodil. The hyacinth stands up stiffly and thinks it's strong, but the wind snaps it in a minute, while the bending daffodil comes out all right. It's always like that with men who try to kill their softer side, and who don't understand women and don't trust them. And now you must go to sleep."

"Will you promise to wake me up when you come to bed and want your dress undone? I'm so much easier to wake than father."

"Yes, I'll wake you. You see, your knowing how to undo my dress will make you a better magistrate one day, or a better governor of an Indian province. There are people who wouldn't see how this is so, but it's true."

Kiel looked quite gay when we opened our eyes upon it next morning. It would have looked gayer still if the ships in the harbour had not been of such a hideous dull grey colour—exactly that of an insect that I have always detested, known as the slater.

The Kaiser's private pleasure yacht, the Hohenzollern, was there and was certainly white; but it was a white that looked as if it ought to have been grey.

I have no doubt that the Hohenzollern was a miracle of luxury inside, with her silver bath for the Kaiser's daughter and other sybaritic appointments; but outside she was not a dream of loveliness. Neither were the two warships that we saw anything like as handsome to behold as our own battleships.

"What funny tin-pot things they look!" said Little Yeogh Wough. "Now I know why all the toy ships we have that are made in Germany never look a bit like ours. They don't look so professional, somehow. Perhaps it's because we're not used to them. I hope they'll let us go on board them."

"Perhaps they will, as there are five or six members of Parliament among us and the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard," I said quite confidently.

But it was notified to us early by the Kiel authorities that the two warships were, as one might say, in dÉshabille, and not tidy enough and trim enough to be inspected. So we had to content ourselves with walking about the town.

Little Yeogh Wough took a snapshot of the Hohenzollern from the jetty, and then walked along with pride and satisfaction on his handsome face because he had managed to do this without attracting anybody's notice. Then we turned up the long main street and saw a good many pretty villas that were charming enough to make one feel one could live in them quite comfortably for two or three months of the summer.

"It is a very nice place," I said, as we passed the last of these tree-embowered villas and began to walk up the hilly main street where the shops begin. "Here's your tobacco shop, by the way."

I stayed outside on the pavement while Little Yeogh Wough went in with his father. When they came out a German officer came out also, treated me to a long, close look and swung on his way.

"He stared hard at me in the shop and then said: 'You're English, are you?'" the boy of my heart informed me. "I told him I was, and he looked hard at me all over again. I felt quite glad that I'd come out without my glasses on."

I felt glad, too, as I looked at his bright face.

How queerly white his lucky lock showed in the sunshine! Surely nothing very bad could ever happen to him in life when he had a lock like that!

"I'm sorry to have to say it, but this old watchmaker fellow here has put my watch right twice as well as an ordinary watchmaker in this sort of town at home in England would do it, and has done it in half the time, into the bargain," his father said presently, emerging from another little shop. "It's astonishing how capable these Germans are. It's a pity they aren't a little better at sanitation. What awful smells there are all over this town!"

This was true. We had been worried by stenches ever since we had begun to walk up the hilly street.

On the way back two small incidents occurred. The first was that Little Yeogh Wough nearly got into serious trouble by taking a photograph of half a dozen street urchins, and the second was that we passed a battalion of soldiers marching with such regularity that the whole mass of them was like one huge moving machine. We stopped and watched them go by, never dreaming of what was coming to us and to them in the very near future.

Ah, Heaven! If we could have foreseen the thing that was coming!

That afternoon the brightness of the day had gone and heavy showers of rain made me give up the idea of going ashore again. Little Yeogh Wough went, however, with his father, and when they came back two hours later he gave me one of the most perfect dark red roses that I have ever seen in my life.

"A German girl gave it to me," he told me. "I asked her for it, right straight out. We were sheltering from one of the showers under the wall of one of those villa gardens, and I saw the rose and it looked so lovely that I told father that I wished I could get it for you. Then, just as the rain was leaving off, the girl came out of the villa into the garden and I asked father to tell me what words to say in German to ask for the rose. And he told me, and I asked her. I couldn't have done it for myself. I only did it because I wanted the rose for you so badly. And she actually said: 'Ja' and gave it to me. Then she smiled and said: 'Auf wiedersehen.' I asked father what that meant, and he said it was the same as the French au revoir, or 'To our next meeting.' But I don't suppose I shall ever see that German girl again."

"No. I don't suppose you ever will."

And so he got his first German gift.

That night I wore the rose.

We had to wait about in the Kiel Canal because a ship had got stuck across one of the narrow parts of it. And the boy said:

"The Kaiser must have felt very much shut in before this canal was made. How funny it is to be on board a ship on a strip of water that's sometimes so narrow that you could have a talk with the people on the banks on either side—just as if you were on the Regent's Canal at home in London!"

It was a joyous occasion for Little Yeogh Wough when he lay in his bed again for his good-night talk with me, and not in a berth.

"It's nice to come home and be welcomed by the children and the dogs. What a pity it is that dogs can't welcome us when we go to Heaven! I've been thinking this ever since Miss Torry told me that Tita didn't eat anything for four days after we'd gone and was so cross with her puppies that she gave them smacks with her paw every time they came near her—all because her heart was breaking. And just because she's got four legs and fur instead of two legs and a bare skin she isn't supposed to have a soul."

His eyes were looking full into mine as our faces rested against the pillow, close to each other.

I had returned to the house an hour in front of him and I knew in what a wonderful way the place seemed to get richer directly he appeared inside its walls. Everything took on a new value the moment he got near it. It is a fine thing not to be an impoverisher, but it is a finer thing still to be an enricher. It is a particularly valuable quality to young people starting in life on small incomes. He himself knew it when he saw it in others.

"I say, Big Yeogh Wough, how is it that you always look quite expensively dressed in hats and coats that most people would throw away if they saw them off you?" he asked me one day.

"I don't know, dear. I only know that there are people like that, while there are other people who could walk through the East End on a Bank Holiday in a fifty-guinea musical-comedy hat without having a single person look at them twice. It hasn't anything to do with handsomeness. Some really beautiful people aren't worth looking at. It has to do with style. When you grow up you'll never need to envy a field-marshal his uniform. Just by being yourself you'll have a uniform more dazzling than any that was ever worn in Europe."

"Is that why you never envy women who can buy their clothes in Paris?"

"I'm too conceited to envy them," I answered him. "A woman who envies other women their things can't think very much of herself. Now, I think so much of myself that if I choose to go out with a hole in my stocking, then holes in stockings are the fashion. You must feel like that, too—within limits. Only, of course, a well-bred man always needs to be smarter than a well-bred woman. By the way, I met one of the great French man-dressmakers at a luncheon at the Mansion House one day and he taught me a lot of wisdom. It all came to this—that you can't dress the undressable person and that the dressable person doesn't need dressing. He said that the struggle to dress royal women and millionaires' wives who were not dressable had turned his hair prematurely grey."

"I suppose it comes to this, too—that we must cultivate ourselves and trust to luck for the rest?"

"Of course," I nodded. "Whatever happens to you—I mean, whatever things you may have to do without—take care that you keep yourself in good condition, body and mind. You can always get new clothes when you want them, so long as the figure they're going to be hung on is all right. Keep your bloom and your graces and your style. Why, even if people went about naked, like savages, there would still be some among them well dressed and some not!"

To-night, as I knelt by his bed with my head resting on the pillow beside his, his mind was on graver things.

"I've been thinking a lot about souls and that sort of thing since Miss Torry told me just now that the colonel along the road here is supposed to be dying. I saw the vicar go in there. I don't want that kind of man coming about me when I'm dying. I couldn't tell my feelings then to a man I'd been playing tennis with a month or two before. Asking a man like that to help you in your last minutes would seem more like a joke than anything else."

"You strange boy! Why, the vicar is a very good man."

"I know he is; but that doesn't make any difference. I'd rather have a worse man who kept to his own calling more."

This was the first time for a long while that the boy of my heart had spoken to me about religion. It prepared me for what I came upon accidentally next day in a private drawer which he had happened to leave not only unlocked, but yawning open—an ivory crucifix.

I stood and looked at the sacred thing, as it lay partly hidden and partly revealed among a few boyish treasures that included a few letters that I had written him at the rare times when we had been separated.

That crucifix hidden away in his drawer meant more, far more, than even I could guess. It told a story of strange workings in the deeps of his soul. I knew better than to say a word to him about it. But that night, when I went to see him in bed, my kiss was warmer and my arm under his head tenderer even than usual.

"Dear Big Yeogh Wough! Dear Big Yeogh Wough!" he murmured caressingly.

"How is it, Roland, that you never say 'darling'? I don't think I've ever heard you say it in your life, any more than I've ever heard you talk slang."

"I don't know. I don't want to say it, somehow. You know, you yourself say it's cheap."

"It's cheap when a woman says it, because women generally say it too easily; but it can be a grand word when a man speaks it—or a boy. Still, I am quite satisfied that you should call me just Big Yeogh Wough. I know I am dearer to you than anyone else in the world can ever be—at least, until you grow up and fall in love."

I had spoken with a laugh, but he answered me gravely.

"I shall have to find a very special sort of girl before I leave you for her."

A few minutes later, when I had risen from beside his bed and was opening his window, he said:

"Did you see those Territorials coming along just as we turned in at the gate here? Did you see how well they marched? Of course, they were only Territorials and people always laugh at them, but there's something so splendid in the sound of marching feet that I can't get it out of my head. It made me feel for the first time almost sorry that I'm never going to be a soldier."

Oh, that splendid sound of marching feet, so grand, so gay, and yet so heartbreaking! He was to hear it often enough in a very few years to come!